FERN’s Friday Feed: Slippery, slimy, sublime
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
What explains our fascination with eels?
Literary Hub
“The French chef Adrien Ferrand grew up with eels, which he caught with his father while on summer visits to his grandparents’ home in Burgundy,” writes Ellen Ruppel Shell. “[H]is Restaurant Eels was lauded by critics as among the best bistros in Paris, even in the world. Intrigued, I agreed to meet Ferrand at his workplace and taste for myself … And Ferrand’s food was worth the trip—including his signature smoked eel with Granny Smith apple, licorice root, and hazelnuts … But Ferrand confessed he had not given eels a lot of thought. So why name your restaurant Eels, I asked? ‘Eels are something very special,’ he said. ‘They speak to me of something I can’t explain, something beyond words, perhaps beyond memory’ … Nothing like us or what we hope to be, the eel is nearly impossible to anthropomorphize. It has neither the brainy quirks of an octopus nor the childlike playfulness of a dolphin. It’s not fierce like the shark, nor majestic like the tuna. So why did it draw in Ferrand, as it has so many artists?”
Why OSHA is powerless to help stop bird flu on U.S. dairy farms
FERN and The New Republic
“In early July, a dairy farm worker in Colorado tested positive for H5N1, the current strain of avian flu that’s ripping through dairy cows. It marked the fourth human case contracted on a dairy farm; a worker tested positive in Texas in April, and then two others in Michigan. While the virus has yet to be found spreading among the general public,” writes Bryce Covert, “it’s clear that the dairy industry’s workforce is very much at risk of infection. And each time a new person gets sick, it’s a chance for the virus to mutate, allowing it to potentially spread beyond the agricultural workforce. The obvious federal body to tackle this problem is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is responsible for preventing American workers from getting sick or hurt on the job. But OSHA can’t touch most dairy farms because of their small size.”
Lights out at a cosmic restaurant
The New York Times
“If you’re about to stay up all night atop a cold mountain, to squint through an eyepiece at shimmering, impossibly distant specks of light or to stare at pixels on a screen, it helps to have eaten a good meal first. So it was dismaying to learn recently that Palomar Observatory in Southern California, home to the famous 200-inch Hale Telescope — the ‘Big Eye’ — has closed the kitchen that served elegant sit-down meals to astronomers during their observing runs,” writes Dennis Overbye. “Thus ends one of the most endearing traditions in astronomy: dinner with your colleagues, a chance to brainstorm, gossip, learn what everybody else is doing, hear old stories, and just hang out together on cloudy nights. From now on astronomers checking into the Monastery, the lodge where observers stay while using the telescopes on Palomar, will have to make do with frozen meals that they can heat up and eat on their own.”
Public health experts want Coke out of the Olympics
Wired
“The Coca-Cola Company is the longest-standing sponsor of the Olympic Games—a relationship dating so far back that Coke still had cocaine in it when it started. Today,” writes Isabel Fraser, “Coca-Cola spends an estimated $20 million every year to associate its brand with that of the Olympics. Whatever its positive effects, the deal hasn’t convinced everyone of the company’s virtues, and calls from public health experts for the International Olympic Committee to end the partnership have grown louder over recent years. Increasingly, they’re reminiscent of successful campaigns to ban Olympic tobacco sponsorships in the 1980s.”
‘Stoofvlees better than coq au vin’
Atlas Obscura
“It all started on June 15, 2024, when an Albanian soccer fan at the UEFA European Championship tournament in Germany mocked a rival Italian fan by committing an unspeakable cultural crime: breaking spaghetti in half. In a video that went viral, the Italian fan falls to his knees in mock despair as shards of dried noodles rain from the heavens,” writes Diana Hubbell. “Then came the Olympics … When Hong Kong’s Cheung Ka Long won the gold medal against Italy’s Filippo Macchi in men’s foil fencing, Pizza Hut offered free pineapple on pizza—considered an affront to Italian pizza purists—at its Hong Kong and Macau branches. Dunking on national foods as a shorthand for national rivalries is nothing new. There’s a whole corner of TikTok where creators gleefully dump ketchup on spaghetti, sizzle nigiri, and commit other crimes against cuisines. It’s all done with tongues firmly planted in cheeks, of course, although it ties into a much older tradition of gastronationalism as political soft power.”